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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1313 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What are your 'load-bearing beliefs?' The ones that, if they were disproven (to your epistemic satisfaction) would actually 'collapse' your worldview and force a reckoning with your understanding of reality.

I'm definitively talking about the "is" side of the is/ought distinction. Not your moral beliefs or 'hopes' for how things will turn out.

And not focused on such dry, mostly undisputed facts like "the earth's gravity pulls things towards it center" or "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."

Ideally beliefs that you consistently use to make predictions about actual events, despite not having sincere certainty about their accuracy.

One that I've been leaning on a lot lately: "Intelligence tends to be positively (if imperfectly) correlated with wisdom."

This is probably the one thing preserving my general optimism for humanity's future.

There are definitely high-IQ sociopaths running about, but I strongly believe that the world would be in a much worse place if the smartest apes amongst us were not also generally aware of their own limitations and were trying to make good decisions that considered more than just short term interests.

Limits to growth. If the line go up forever/space colonization crowd is right almost all my beliefs fall apart.

I mean, we haven't figured out how to circumvent physics. There is a hard upper bound.

But it turns out that said upper bound is in theory way higher than you might intuitively expect. Harnessing the total energy output of our local sun is a good starting point. But genuinely, humanity's limit will probably be more psychological and social than physical. Can we coordinate well enough to get out there without blowing ourselves up?

Hence why I hopefully believe that intelligence and wisdom are linked.

But I like this answer. Do you have a specific expectation as to where the limit exists?

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